The UpTake: Paul Armstrong does a lot of thinking about monsters. That's his job as the co-founder and chief creative officer of Choremonster, an app company that uses monsters to get kids to do chores.

It’s obvious from the name that Cincinnati startup ChoreMonster involves, well, monsters.

The mobile app for Apple devices – an Android version is coming next month – uses cute and goofy monsters to encourage kids to do their chores. They’ve got a very distinctive style, so I sat down with ChoreMonster co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Paul Armstrong to see what goes into making a monster.

“The goal is to make them (kids) feel like the app is not just about them doing things, that it’s a little more enjoyable than just doing their chores,” Armstrong told me. “No kid wants to feel like they’re just their parents’ free labor. We want to make it feel like there’s a lot more fun and purpose.”

Kids earn tickets for doing chores and take those tickets to the in-app Monster Carnival where they spin a wheel for a chance to win a monster. Monsters are awarded randomly, so the surprise and delight of winning them encourages the kids to keep doing their chores so they can come back.

Armstrong starts each monster with a general shape – long or round or potato-shaped. Then he decides on things like how many arms and legs to give them, how many eyes, whether they’ll be hairy, if they’ll be happy or angry or grumpy or blah.

“It’s all pretty random,” he said. “After I feel pretty good about them, feel like they have a pretty good personality, then I name them, which gets pretty hard. Because they don’t have normal names. They can’t have normal names. There’s a normalness to them, but they’re pretty off.”

The monsters have names like Thump McSquashington, Jeff Geoff, Chin Grumply, Floofy Chubbwubb and Emo Whatevs. There are even some nods to pop culture references only parents would get, like Seabass Dujour (inspired by Dumb and Dumber) and Ricky Blake Donutmoss (inspired by Glengary Glenross).

After the monsters are named, Armstrong comes up with a biography for them. Each monster has hobbies, favorite foods and a favorite color.

“In keeping with the kind of absurd and real with their names, for a hobby they may like playing outside and then quantum physics. Weird things that are silly and kids might laugh at,” he said. “Like, their favorite food might be ridiculous and normal. Like they might like broccoli and then their favorite donut is filled with mayonnaise and covered with ketchup.”

After each monster is drawn, named and has a biography, he crafts them in Adobe Illustrator. From there, ChoreMonster’s animator will animate them. Each monster is interactive and will perform an action when touched in the app. Armstrong said most of them burp or fart. One of them, Pedro Scrubbins, farts fire. I had to ask him why.

“Probably because of their diets. Chicken pizza will do that to you,” he said. “Because it’s hilarious, that’s why. Honestly, it’s just tapping into what I always thought was funny as a kid, but now I tell myself, ‘Well, I’m a mature adult. I don’t laugh at this.’ But I do.”

Armstrong actually walked me through the creative process of making a monster. He asked me to pick a shape, number of arms, eyes, legs and affect for the monster. I told him the monster should be hourglass-shaped; have three eyes; an impractical third leg; be kind of bored and have short, stubby, useless T-Rex arms.

When asked about the bio, I said the monster played bass guitar in a punk rock band in high school and he always tells himself he’s going to pick it back up now as an adult, but his bass kind of just sits in the corner unused and gathering dust. They say write what you know, right?

Armstong draws with a trackpad attached to his computer and not a tablet and pen, like many other illustrators would. He said it actually gives him a lot more control.

He has a pretty distinct style he said he developed when drawing monsters with his middle son four years ago.

“I approach it a lot more like design than an illustrator. A lot of people illustrate with a lot of heavy outlines, and I wanted to get away from that and focus more on texture and color differences,” Armstong, a designer by trade and training, said. “It’s simple, but it lent itself to a style that’s not being done.”

He decided to use the monsters in a website that looked at users’ Twitter feeds and assigned them a monster based on their personality, like a hipster monster or business monster or sporty monster. Then ChoreMonster co-founder and CEO Chris Bergman was coming up with the idea for the app, and the two pressed the monsters into service for it.

In all, it took him about 30 minutes to get a pretty great rough draft done of the monster I helped with. He even gave it a bass guitar. Check it out by clicking the image to the right.

And as he said earlier, settling on a name was a lot more difficult than the initial pencil sketch of the monster. He first put in, and deleted, a number of names like Curffle Rex and Pflenner Carbo and Blah Pearington before settling, tentatively, on Florex Amp.

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